Sounds like The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde.
I believe there’s also a more recent ‘childrens’ version available by Susannah Davidson
I used to love The Borrowers books by Mary Norton - may not have aged well, though, as they’re set in the 1950s English countryside…
More recently, The Various by Steve Augarde was good. A young girl has to spend her holidays with her uncle on his farm and encounters various fey beings… If you like Alan Garner’s books then you’ll quite likely like this one.
I haven’t read Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series, only the Old Kingdom trilogy, but a friend of mine has read both. She says the Keys series is geared towards a much younger audience. Read Sabriel, which is dark fantasy, and if you find you like it, rejoice that it’s the beginning of a trilogy.
Honestly, I haven’t given it to anyone who doesn’t like it.
Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman Family series is good- Homecoming, Dicey’s Song, Seventeen Against the Dealer, A Solitary Blue, Sons From Afar. Some of them are more for girls, some for boys. They’re not fantasy- I think they take place in the 70’s or early 80’s in America. Excellent books, although not fantasy. I read them at 11 or 12.
John Bellairs is excellent, and still frigging scares the pants off me. But I’m a wimp. The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, Lamp from the Warlock’s Tomb, The Curse of the Blue Figurine.
Robin McKinley’s Beauty, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, is lovely and very suitable for the 11-14 age group. In a couple of years give them The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, too. I think they’re all being reprinted by Firebird Press, which is…um… part of HarperCollins, I think.
As others here have pointed out, Diana Wynne Jones has written many good books. Fire and Hemlock is one of her most serious and somber, so it might not be a good one to start with; it’s also maybe more of a girl book. Her Chronicles of Chestomanci are probably closest to Harry Potter; and Howl’s Moving Castle has the advantage that there’s a recent movie of it.
These are all good, but there are differences between them. Some tell a single story; others are more episodic and the main storyline is mostly a frame within which stories from earlier times are told. Some have ghosts and other fantastic elements; at least one (A Stranger at Green Knowe) does not. So I can imagine a kid possibly liking some of these but not others.
I tried reading Garth Nix’s Sabriel not too long ago, and I just could not get into it. Enough people, here and elsewhere, have praised it that I might give it another try. But when a fantasy book starts with a Prologue, in which I don’t know who anyone is or what’s going on, and then shifts to a Chapter One with a completely different setting and characters but I still don’t know who anyone is or what’s going on there either, that strikes me as bad storytelling.
The one I read didn’t go as far as the one you read, but I really appreciated the tone the book had, that Alice was normal for noticing that she was growing up, and that her relationship with her father allowed her to ask about some touchy things.
Thanks for figuring out what books I meant!
Thanks for asking a question I know the answer to! I think that’s the first time that’s happened around here.
Terry Pratchett also has a book called The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, that’s aimed at the same age group as The Wee Free Men and Hat Full of Sky.
Patricia Wrede also wrote the Enchanted Forest series, starting with Dealing with Dragons. They are great pre-teen/teen reading about a princess who gets kidnapped by a very cultured dragon, and decides that she likes it so much that she refuses to get rescued.
No one’s mentioned A Series of Unfortunate Events? 11 years olds can handle it, though they’ll miss out on a lot of the fun touches for older readers (references, parodies, puns). The books still read well as an adventure story, espeically if the kids are bookwormish types.
And I second/third/whatever Ellen Raskin, an amazing writer. The Westing Game is a masterpiece, but The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) was terrific, and I also likedFiggs and Phantoms (which looks like it might be out of print!).
YES! It was a spin on Wilde’s Canterville Ghost (naturally, previous to posting last night, I spent about 20 minutes googling “Canterbury Ghost” to no avail), but it was definitely set in modern times. The version I remember from childhood doesn’t seem quite like Davidson’s, but there appear to be a few other retellings out there as well. Thanks for the good info!
I just thought I’d let you all know how much the girl’s mom appreciates this!
I read The Borrows when I was about that age and that was less than a decade ago. I loved them. I liked The Littles too. I couldn’t get enough of the idea of miniture people. I also read a lot of Heilein at that age, both what are now considered young adult novels and his adult ones.
If the kids are into fantasy, I’d recomend all of Tamora Pierce’s books. There are five different quartets and another pair of books, set in two different, unrelated worlds, but both are very good.